Communication matters.

The Corporate Village

In a recent blog post, techno pundit Robert X. Cringely uses Susan Boyle's stunning performance on Britain's Got Talent (sitting at 37 million views as I'm writing this) to illustrate the power of the Internet to create shared experiences.

"Marshall McLuhan, who seems smarter every day, called it The Global Village. He said communication technology would link us together in
ways we couldn’t imagine and those ways would lead to common
experiences and shared values. McLuhan didn’t know about the Internet
when he wrote that and he sure as Hell didn’t know about Twitter. But
his prediction came true.....[And] every time our Global
Village comes together in this way, it’s because of a shared delight
that makes us feel more alike and less apart. We could all use more of that."

Are today's communicators helping create meaningful shared experiences in the workplace? Or are we too busy shoveling information onto intranets that no one wants to read?

Sadly, the only true shared experience in many big organizations is the frustration of dealing with bureaucracy.

We had a situation at my company that proves the point here. Job applicant information was potentially compromised via a purloined laptop. The laptop was returned -- an attempt had been made to access it but had failed. But we were required to notify people, both for internal policy reasons as well as various state laws.

You know how organizations work. You have to tell someone bad news, and no one wants their name on it. You may have gotten similar letters about your data being compromised -- incomprehensible jargon, difficult to find who's sending it, no name on the letter, maybe a call center which turns out to be in some foreign country. (I received one exactly like that -- and it turned out to be from my own company!)

It was a painful internal experience. We succeeded in translating the letter from jargon to English. We succeeded in giving both a call center number and our own 1-800 number. And while it had been an HR problem, I (corporate communications)finally volunteered to put my name on the letter that was sent to 120 people.

I answered each message that was left on the 1-800 number. I walked people through how to get a free credit watch service. I explained what happened and that while their information hadn't been compromised, we had to treat it like it was.

Time-consuming, maddening at times (I said a lot of things about HR under my breath) -- but absolutely the best thing we could have done. Over and over people told me they were shocked to have a real person to talk to. We calmed people down who were legitimately upset. We talked in conversational English. We apologized. I handled 42 calls, averaging about 4 minutes each.

As it turned out, more than half of the applicants had been current employees. So in addition to doing the right "global village" thing, we had a positive employee communication as well.